There is in human beings, as in plants and animals, a certain natural
impulse of growth, and this is just as true of mental as of physical
development. Physical development is helped by air and nourishment
and exercise, and may be hindered by the sort of treatment which made
Chinese women’s feet small. In just the same way mental development
may be helped or hindered by outside influences. The outside
influences that help are those that merely provide encouragement or
mental food or opportunities for exercising mental faculties. The
influences that hinder are those that interfere with growth by
applying any kind of force, whether discipline or authority or fear or
the tyranny of public opinion or the necessity of engaging in some
totally incongenial occupation. Worst of all influences are those
that thwart or twist a man’s fundamental impulse, which is what shows
itself as conscience in the moral sphere; such influences are likely
to do a man an inward danger from which he will never recover.Those who realize the harm that can be done to others by any use of
force against them, and the worthlessness of the goods that can be
acquired by force, will be very full of respect for the liberty of
others; they will not try to bind them or fetter them; they will be
slow to judge and swift to sympathize; they will treat every human
being with a kind of tenderness, because the principle of good in him
is at once fragile and infinitely precious. They will not condemn
those who are unlike themselves; they will know and feel that
individuality brings differences and uniformity means death. They
will wish each human being to be as much a living thing and as little
a mechanical product as it is possible to be; they will cherish in
each one just those things which the harsh usage of a ruthless world
would destroy. In one word, all their dealings with others will be
inspired by a deep impulse of reverence.
The sometime curse of ‘modernity’
To be modern is to be thought by many as indubitably superior to the days of old. This sentiment is not new, it was widely felt during the Renaissance in relation to the Gothic period, or again during the Dark Ages in relation to the debauchery of the ancients. Sometimes it has been psychologically optimistic, as was the case with the Renaissance which confidently scourged the ignorance of the scholasticism that preceded it; in other eras it has been melancholy and lamenting, as with the poets of Dark Age courts who, despite the clerics’ moral sternness, rued the riches, loves, and conquests that could only find expression in the epics of Greco-Roman poets, and wished that they could die to live it once again.
In our modern age, and especially in recently socially liberated places like Ireland and Quebec, the past is seen as a dark scourge where only superstition, oppression and ignorance reigns. In Ireland’s case (though not in that of Quebec), this has entailed the wholescale repudiation of the native tongue as “backward”, “uncouth”, and “unfit” for modern men. New accents have sprung up, eschewing the old as shameful and unworthy of true civilization. With this change in mental outlook goes a whole range of feelings and behaviours that are often calamitous to rightly guided thinking. Socrates once said, as everyone knows, that the unexamined life is not worth living. In Ireland, what is modern is unquestionably the “good” and any doubt that is thrown on this proposition is met with barely constrained obloquy. The state of intellectual life in this nouveau départ is curious. It is, one might say, the very essence of unexamined living. The good, we are told, is accumulation, and accumulation is to be found only in wealth and its direct derivatives. What must be sought, then, at all costs is wealth generation and the surefire means of ensuring this, it is thought, is by foreign direct investment. Now, only a fool would deny that Ireland, as a lonesome island on Europe’s north shore, can survive in solo. The need for open trade, multilateral commerce and free economic endeavour are, I think, agreed to by almost all. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, Irish political life has been dominated, on an almost unprecedented scale for a developed country, by a desire to placate certain interests, whatever the opportunity cost. Whence we find Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s 2002 contention that Ireland could not dictate Shannon Airport being closed to U.S. military flights due to fears that U.S. investors may take a dim view of such action. I make no judgement on the rights and wrongs of the flights as things in themselves, but surely this is unprecedented candour of a most astonishing kind. We dare not, say the Irish, do that which may upset our backers, even if those backers have expressed no direct interest in the matter. We are ever on your side, whatever the question.
Can one really be surprised, then, at the craven response of the Irish political classes to the global crisis? Can one claim astonishment at the complete lack of foresight and sense of paralyzing shock that gripped all on its advent? Can one really have expected such a governing philosophy to have produced a far-sighted approach to the mad vicissitudes of global financial packaging as it hurtled towards a pyre of its own fashioning? Who was to tell these modern day Prometheus’ that their methods may lead to final disaster? Not the Irish Ephialtes.
The basis for scientific induction
The principle of induction has been a bone of contention for philosophers for over 2,000 years. For much of that period, deduction was thought to be the key to our “thinking rightly”. Aristotle, for instance, believed that he had both created and completed formal logic with the creation of the syllogism, for given this tool, justified deductions could be made and knowledge rendered sure. In this, most philosophers up to and including Descartes agreed. Unfortunately for the Stagirite, his stop was not quite the end of the road.
Induction, though Aristotle spoke much of it, was on the whole foreign to the Greek mind. Deductive properties were thought the essence to attain knowledge whilst the misty route of opinion was heartily eschewed. Yet without framing correct hypothesis to test, our knowledge is seriously deficient. It is only on testing that we can identify the induction, or postulate, as justified, for without this, we are stuck in a logical cul-de-sac. The notion of “correct” propositions I reject, for any contingent proposition is only justified for as long as it cannot be falsified. No wonder most sane men take the first train out of the station named logic. The question, which is rarely asked by the common man, of how we frame our hypothesis is a curious one. Throughout more than 2,000 years of recorded philosophy, no-one has yet created a method for creating inductive propositions. It must, it seems, proceed only by imagination, and following that, deductive rigour (from which imagination is not entirely absent).
Debt and Economic Bubbles – Idols of the Marketplace
For most laymen, the reasons for why economic bubbles occur is a mysterious and murky business; all that is known is that in a capitalistic society, they do, and at increasingly shorter intervals. It is hoped that by delegating examination of the problem to that priestly cast of intelligent men whom we term ”economists”, such events can be pinpointed and steered clear of before they occur. Alas, the record on the latter point is none too fruitful. When dealing with economic booms and busts, there are usually a variety of complex indicators we can point to to elucidate the possible reasons for why one or the other is taking place, whether or not either can be justified as related to fact however, is quite another matter. As with any problem, whether scientific or otherwise, the key, then, is to set the soundness of our induction on a firm footing, whence we can deduce probable causes and possible solutions.
Why is the current economic crisis occurring? I should say that a great variety of factors, most dating back 50 or so years are at play, but let us try to narrow the matter down to the essentials. The key to most economic modelling is “rationality”. Rationality here, however, is something quite different to the common understanding of the word. In economics, the notion of rationality deals with surety as to the future. This is not as surprising as it may first appear, for economists are not so much experts on things as they are, but on models as they exist. If a particular model should hold (and outside of firm empirical contradiction, it usually will), well and good, serenity reigns. If it should however fail, the particular economist, or economic school which holds to it, becomes immediately anachronistic, and may even become dangerous. Of this, Marxism affords an example. It is to be wondered whether neo-classicalism will soon afford another.
Let us now define our standing major premise: a stable environment will gradually induce undue surety in the future on the part of both borrowers and lenders, provoking rising levels of debt (repackaged, speculatively-funded and otherwise) which will eventually outstrip repayment possibilities. This will, in turn, cause deleveraging to occur on the part of borrowers, and, if serious enough, the triggering of a “bust”. Minor premise: that the idol of the tribe, or the non-rational constitution of most human sentiments, causes many economists to believe that more order is exhibited in the universe than can actually be found. This feeds into the neo-classical contention that homo economicus is a “rational maximizer” and not one, as per Minsky, whose ”success breeds daring and instability”, he believing that the current propice conditions are likely to maintain indefinitely. This is rather similar to Russell’s analysis on why traditional power decays, outside of the agent of foreign invasion. Neo-classical theory predicated on austerity and inveterately low taxes as a means to exit the current impasse, it may be fairly contended, is no more than a Baconian idol of the marketplace.
That which is just
In our last topic, we discussed the troubling concept of “justice”. What is thought, on the surface at least, to be self-evident, shows itself to be very much less than that upon sustained reflection. In our voyage over the history of the term, we saw that there were two major dichotomies at play, the first relating to the Greeks, who decided that justice consisted in everyone doing that which he was assigned to do and no further (note that this is implicitly related to the ancient Greek religious ideas of “boundary”, the proposition that nothing should overstep its natural bounds lest the wrath of the gods be unleashed to wreak strife and place things back to normal), and that of equality, spawned by the American and French revolutions. There are other conceptions, of course, but let us leave them aside for now. In any case, they do not distract from our argument.
Government, as with the idea of justice, did not exist in a natural state before recorded history began. Rather, it seems prudent to suppose that government grew up, bit-by-bit, as a function of the increasing fixity of custom. Customs, of course, vary widely from place to place but one constant can be seen throughout – the tending towards an authority. In the ancient past, this authority was very often a king, usually credited with mystical powers and a direct line to the gods. A priesthood usually served to validate the king’s holiness, unless the priests saw that they would be better served ruling themselves and transformed the king into a pawn at their mercy. This, one gathers, happened frequently in ancient Egypt.
What of justice?
The concept of justice has been a founding stone of Greek philosophy since the time of that nebulous first recorded philosopher, Thales. It exercised the mind of Socrates to such an extent that a discussion on defining just what it might be occupies the first part of Plato’s Republic. It has been discussed and analyzed by minds as diverse as Aristotle, Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel and Locke. What, then, can we say of justice?
As with most philosophical problems, language is as good a point of departure as any. The English word justice, taken from the French, etymologically refers to ”the exercise of authority in vindication of right by assigning reward or punishment”; the original Latin word means “that which conforms to the law”. This definition, of course, cannot be admitted except superficially, but it does serve as a safe port from which to launch our ship of seeking. It will be remembered, furthermore, that the above definition still pervades our thoughts on ‘just’ actions today.
Happiness and work
Modern work and higher education are intimately interlinked; such has been the case since at least the early 20th century. The modern workplace, in the West at least, is largely concentrated on the tertiary sector, with a smaller percentage working in the construction, farming, and other primary and secondary industries. The education system, under the control of the state, is ordered to facilitate this end, usually without any appreciable check. What is good for the economic stability of the state is thought good for the student: in this way a unification of wills is effected, and old classical learning is eschewed as useless for modern men. If it is to remain, it is usually in the hands of a few eccentrics who are destined to play a wholly unimportant role in any event. Whatever the industry, the problem we shall be discussing today remains the same – routine and monotony. A very large proportion of modern workers are caught in unfulfilling jobs, mostly this is down to two reasons: a belief that current boredom will later be replaced with financial reward, or, alternatively, current financial reward is compensation enough for the daily unfulfillment that results. This is an evidently perilous state of affairs.
If we should look at any past age, we will generally see that is characterized by one of two tendencies: an emotionally-confident mindset where dogma and fanaticism are shunned for openness and pride of discovery – this was the case during the golden age of Greek philosophy before Alexander, it also characterizes the Renaissance until 1520. To this spirit, however, is coupled an older, more vituperative partner: that of absolute surety, fear and dogmatic self-assertion. This was the lot of Western Europe after the fall of Rome; it pervades the mindsets of many ruling classes throughout the Middle East and Africa today, where the ruling elites have become conservative, stereotyped and devoid of new discovery. The recent irruption of youthful vigour throughout the Arab world, and further afield, is a natural reaction against this hegemonic constraint on liberty. However this is getting us away from our topic on happiness and work, to which we must now return.
The question of power
Power is a defining desire in the lives of men and women, it is, I should say, the chief motivating desire behind all human action. Vanity may be thought a close competitor, but vanity is merely a product of the desire for power. Human power today is more extended than at any other time in history. Modern man, unlike his historic ancestors, has not only conquered land, he has also conquered machines. Industrialization, the naked expression of modern power, and its physical and psychological effects, so derided by the romantics, are perhaps the largest factors in the West’s current cultural make-up.
The world since 1700, it is near trite to say, has changed immeasurably. Industrialization has spawned Marx and Rousseau. It has given us the coal mines of Belgium and the skyscrapers of New York. It has enabled magnificent feats, and provoked fearful terrors. Industrialization, I contend, has gradually caused men to look within themselves, not without. It, and its close relative, the global market, have caused a diminishing belief in an all-powerful God and an increasing hope in an all-powerful man. Curiously, as physical power has increased, so has psychological power diminished. I will deal in this article then with power’s internal aspects as I see them; external impacts of power, and their future portents, will be covered in succeeding pieces.
Altruism
The roots of altruism explored:
Language and its relation to the world at large
The work of Noam Chomsky in the realms of linguistics and politics has been innovative, thought-provoking, controversial, and, at times, fiery.
In this 1970s BBC discussion, Chomsky discusses his theory of language and the processes by which human beings acquire it. I should perhaps refrain from using a verb such as “acquire” in connection with Chomsky’s theory, for he holds that language is, in certain ways, not acquired, but innate. This being the case, it follows, so the argument holds, that the relation of language to the world is pre-programmed, as is our cognitive means of interpreting the outside world. Heavily Kantian and deterministic in its outworkings, the work of Chomsky continues to be of the highest importance to philosophers and linguistic scientists alike.
